Notes on a Place I Love

I went looking for my stuff on Mechthilde and found that the last time I'd written about her was in Mondulkiri, in northern Cambodia. I love Mondulkiri. I am hoping to do my fieldwork there when I become a real anthropologist...

And I started reading these short impressionistic pieces I'd jotted down about Mondukiri and started missing it fiercely. So here they are:

Christmas Day 2004
In a pioneer town. Golden morning light, wind howling between plank walls, the whine of electric saws, the road out of town boiling with red dust--Sen Monorom, Mondulkiri, on Christmas morning.

I dream a crowd of rough white men seek entrance to the house while my friends are away. I wake to find two utility vehicles loaded with guns parked at the guesthouse beside us. Their wealthy Asian owners shoot rifles at targets just a few metres from the workmen with their saws in the lot below. Semi-automatic weapons are piled in one vehicle. They drive away en masse--to hunt the endangered animals of the highlands? To hunt Montagnards creeping across the border to seek safe haven and to flee their troubled ancestral lands? Either way, something violent and terrible. At night they are loud and drunken, their laughter invading our quiet space. We would gladly see these men away, back to wherever they came from.

The red dust settles everywhere, even on the cashew trees with their broad spatulate leaves. The wind blows the earth over the landscape; the world is daubed with ochre, the sky full of pale light. The burned hills are black, then brights where the young grass has sprouted. The light is thin in this high place. My friend strums his classical guitar and wind whistles and weeps. The shell discs of the mobile by the window ring faintly as small tendrils of wind work their way through cracks in the wooden walls.

Generators throb
a woman washes clothes by hand in a basin
a cat curls beside me
the stilt-high house rocks gently under the wind's pushing hands.

I am reading early Hemmingway, A Moveable Feast:
By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better.

* * *

The last time I was in Mondulkiri, in 2006, I wrote very little because I spent the greater part of every day birding in a "nice patch of wilderness" with my friends' dog Lucas. Lucas is a large lovely black Labrador and he is a bona fide non-human member of the BBC, as he is a bad birder. Well, he's good at finding birds, but not so good at keeping his distance. So birding with Lucas was more a matter of flushing birds and watching them flap frantically into the distance. Due to his presence, I saw, rapidly receding from view, a number of rare birds that normally skulk and never show themselves, like a Germain's peacock pheasant. I think. These rare birds, once flushed, weren't too pleased with either Lucas or I and refused to give us a second chance at sneaking up on them. I am, by the way, Lucas' best non-familial friend Ever. When I get back to Mondulkiri he's going to smell my hand and start leaping up and down going, Hurrah, the human willing to spend hours and hours charging through the woods, hurrah! You've got to love dogs.